Emmanuel B. > Emmanuel's Quotes

“You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”
― Alexander Solzhenitsyn

“We live in an age in which there is no heroic death.”
― Yukio Mishima

“I am more and more convinced that our happiness or unhappiness depends far more on the way we meet the events of life, than on the nature of those events themselves.”
― Wilhelm von Humboldt

“Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“The task must be made difficult, for only the difficult inspires the noble-hearted.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“The world offers you comfort. But you were not made for comfort. You were made for greatness”
― Pope Benedict XVI

“The cynicism that regards hero worship as comical is always shadowed by a sense of physical inferiority.”
― Yukio Mishima, Sun & Steel

“My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary—but love it”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals / Ecce Homo

“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Gesetzt, wir sagen Ja zu einem einzigen Augenblick, so haben wir damit nicht nur zu uns selbst, sondern zu allem Dasein Ja gesagt. Denn es steht Nichts für sich, weder in uns selbst noch in den Dingen: und wenn nur ein einziges Mal unsre Seele wie eine Saite vor Glück gezittert und getönt hat, so waren alle Ewigkeiten nöthig, um dies Eine Geschehen zu bedingen – und alle Ewigkeit war in diesem einzigen Augenblick unseres Jasagens gutgeheißen, erlöst, gerechtfertigt und bejaht”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“We are born into this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue, like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him. That is greatness. That is what it means to be a thoroughbred. The honorable end is the one thing that can not be taken from a man.”
― Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life

“The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. "One word of truth outweighs the world.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“The glory of God is the human person fully alive.”
― Irenaeus of Lyons

“The world belongs to the energetic.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“Liberty is good, but more important is order, and the maintenance of order justifies any means.”
― T.S. Eliot

“The ultimate goal of Pythagorean and Platonic philosophy was assimilation to god through the cultivation of virtue and truth. It meant a return to the first principles reached through philosophical education (paideia) and recollection (anamnesis), scientific investigation, contemplation, and liturgy (or theurgic ascent), based on the ineffable symbols and sacramental rites.”
― Algis Uždavinys, The Golden Chain: An Anthology of Pythagorean and Platonic Philosophy

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées